Peak Pharma: Toward a New Political Economy of Health
Schedule
Mon Feb 02 2026 at 06:15 pm to 08:15 pm
UTC+00:00Location
IAS Common Ground, G11, South Wing | London, EN
About this Event
Peak Pharma: Toward a New Political Economy of Health
Susi Geiger and Théo Bourgeron (December 2025, Oxford University Press)
This book argues that we have reached the ‘peak’ of a particular model for pharmaceutical innovation—the neoliberal value model that has been in place since the early 1980s. ‘Peak’ designates a state where a given and socially significant resource becomes rarer, more difficult to access, and more expensive, to a point where the balance of societal costs incurred and value gained reaches a tipping point. We argue that the neoliberal pharmaceutical system is reaching its ‘peak’ in several vital respects: peak pricing, peak concentration, peak financialization, peak expansion. We thus use the term to signal the crisis and possible end of an era-defining business model in the pharmaceutical sector.
The book presents empirical research and synthesizes a large body of knowledge that is currently spread across political economy, sociology, STS, organization studies and the history of medicine to trace the long-wave movements between the pharmaceutical industry, its discontents, and regulators. Specifically, we follow the multiple market failures that the neoliberal regime created and the various contestations and attempts at market repair these failures engendered. Projecting what might follow post-peak, we sketch two scenarios. The first is a dystopian one, the pharmafeudal value regime, where the alienation and exclusion the system has fostered is being driven ever-further through developments in so-called personalized medicine. The second is a more optimistic, dare we say utopian, one that we call the commons-based value regime, where current experiments with alternative pharmaceutical economies are systematically supported and come to represent a true alternative to the current market forces at play. We close this book with a set of recommendations for policymakers and activists interested in fostering such an alternative pharmaceutical model.
The UCL Centre for Capitalism Studies is a world-leading centre for critical interdisciplinary research into the past, present, and future of capitalism. It brings together UCL faculty and students studying how markets, finance and economic institutions shape our everyday life, structure societies’ capacity to change, and are contested and remade across time and space.
About the Speakers
Susi Geiger
Full Professor of Markets, Organizations and Society at University College Dublin
Her research investigates how markets are organized in the context of social justice and public good concerns, particularly in ‘monopoly capitalist’ markets such as pharmaceuticals and data markets. She has published numerous journal articles on these issues, including in Organization Studies, Research Policy, Economy & Society, Journal of Cultural Economy, Health Policy, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Management Studies, Business & Society, New Political Economy, and many others, and she has edited several book volumes, including the recent ‘Market Studies: Mapping, Theorizing and Impacting Market Action’ (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Her monograph ‘Peak Pharma: Toward a new political economy of health’ has just been published at Oxford University Press (December 2025).
Prof Geiger sits on several editorial boards, including Organization Studies, and has held prestigious research grants and fellowships, including a European Research Council Consolidator grant entitled MISFIRES (2018-2024) She is an ERC Ambassador and a member of the WHO Technical Advisory Group on Pharmaceutical Pricing Policies, and she has been a visiting fellow at globally renowned institutions including UC Berkeley, Ecole de Mines, Stockholm School of Economics, Weizenbaum Institute Berlin, and Brocher Foundation, Switzerland.
More about Susi Geiger
Dr Théo Bourgeron
Chancellor's fellow at University of Edinburgh, School of Social and Political Sciences
His research has looked at the entanglement between politics and markets. Before Peak Pharma, he has co-authored a book on links between the financial sector and the alt-right (Alt-Finance, Pluto Books, 2022). He has published in journals such as the Socio-Economic Review, Economy & Society, New Political Economy, Organization Studies.
More about Dr Théo Bourgeron
Where is it happening?
IAS Common Ground, G11, South Wing, Gower Street, London, United KingdomEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
GBP 0.00
